Ethics, smartness, and riches...
(WHISTLING)
OK, guys, time-out here a minute.
All of you are now trying to argue the edge of a razor. You're all arguing in the
wrong direction and looking in it, too.
First off, this has
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with money or the exact dollar figure. So quit arguing that point. Bill was never interested in money; or better put, obscene richness was
NOT Bill's end goal. It was a major part of his strategy, but it was
NOT the end goal or the yardstick by which he and Microsoft measure success.
That metric is
POWER, plain and simple. Because, simply put, Bill knows that by obtaining power, you can control everything. And, Bill has always been a power freak. In fact, I would go so far as to say he has had a greater taste for power than anyone in business history, including Kennedy, Carnegie, Rockafeller, all the coal, oil, railroad and steel millionaires and billionaires of the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. And, let me assure you, ladies and gentlemen, those guys were very power hungry and played for keeps.
You might be tempted to argue, "Well, Bill Gates never killed anyone, so he's not as corrupt or power-hungry." Don't go there, because times have changed. You don't have to kill anyone anymore to get power, except in limited circumstances and in certain specific industries (none of which is Microsoft into... yet...)
Anyhow, none of the guys I mentioned above ran the entire world, and even so there weren't nearly as many people on it at the time as there are now, and Bill has made it extremely obvious that he wants the
ENTIRE WORLD to run his OS. To wit: PCs, servers, handhelds, media players, console game systems (and a bunch of leading game manufacturers to boot), and who knows what is next.
Trying to make the argument that "Bill Gates is smart, and therefore he knows what he is doing" is really a straw argument in my opinion. Bill Gates is like a corrupt politician. It's a matter of what he can get away with, who he has to put pressure on, who he has to buy off, etc. This makes him a modern-day strong-arm-tactic-using person, and nothing more.
Take the U.S. anti-trust case. I'm going to draw from a political parallel, not that I'm trying to start a political discussion here.
In the mid-late 1990s, the U.S. government was going to impeach then-president Bill Clinton. The reasons that had been cited generally up to then were: his lying to investigators, involvement in and connection to money-laundrying, abuse of power, etc. Anyone remember Filegate? Or Whitewater? Or what's-his-name who "died" suddenly before he could be called to testify?
Anyhow, the press and many politicians made a big fuss over his marriage and his sexual infidelity, trying to steer this whole thing off-course. It got to such a fever pitch that that is largely what the prosecution went with. Now, don't get me wrong, I think what he did in that regard was immoral, sends a bad message to our society and our kids, that he disbused his place as a "role model", and the like, but I would agree that these are not exactly impeachable offences. As a consequence, the charges were dismissed and Clinton went scott-free.
This is PRECISELY the kind of thing that happened during the MS/US Anti-trust proceedings. Microsoft has stolen, they have lied and cheated. They have used undue and illegal influence, ill-gotten gains, bought their way into monopoly status, engaged in collusion, probably are even guilty of some of the provisions of the RIICO act, etc., but none of that was what wound up in the final trial or the judge's
findings of fact.
Ultimately, there was nothing "sufficiently damning" (my words, not the judge's) to do anything severe against Microsoft. Because of the way that the U.S. justice system works, the judge can only consider information brought before him/her.
Let me interrupt myself at this point and make the observation that yes, indeed, there were many witnesses called to testify, from Sun to Netscape to Apple and others, but given what is in the findings of fact (mentioned above), I am forced to conclude that nothing of significant substance was brought before the judge (or at least was considered by the judge), the penalties were minimal. And, as a further slap in the face, the court even went to the extent of having Microsoft make determinations as to the penalties in some cases and their implimentation.
And remember that stink a year or so ago when Microsoft was going to donate to schools? Only the catch was they'd be donating x86 hardware which was, guess what, going to have to run Microsoft OSs.
What in the heck was that all about?!?
And, let's not forget this either: the U.S. Government was almost certainly running scared because of the possibility of breaking up or out-and-out destroying a company who's products form
their own infrastructure and the infrastructure of many other governments and millions of U.S. and foreign businesses. Besides, even after you factor out whatever legal tax sheltering/dodging schemes their accounting department uses, that company's still gotta be paying a helluva tax bill every quarter. Imagine Uncle Sam doing with
less tax revenue.
What's happened here, folks, is that Microsoft basically side-stepped the U.S. justice system. Other than the usual guesses of "money and power", I'm not sure how they did it, but the point is they did it. And they're going to go on "doing it". What will ulitmately happen, I think, is that the rest of the world is going to be so pissed off with Microsoft that they will, one-at-a-time and in groups pursue some other OS maker (BTW, many have already), and when this happens, America will be the only country (more or less) that still uses MS operating systems, and since the market here will be so locked in, we'll keep using them.
Just like the U.S. is the only country to use English measurement and does little more than pay lip service to metric education except for specialized courses of study in more senior years of school, if a given student even elects to take those courses or pursue a career requiring those courses.
Just like the U.S. is the only country that uses Letter and Legal sizes of paper instead of A4, etc., which are all based on mathematics which allow proper enlargement and reduction when you go from one size to another, instead of how when we enlarge something it
NEVER fits on the next size up paper.
Just like the U.S. is just about the only country in which we almost exclusively use top-loading clothes washers and dryers, even though they cost more money to use, consume more water and tear up our clothes faster.
So, before any of you try to go on being neutral or "open minded" or whatever about Microsoft or, what's worse, even supportive of Bill or Microsoft, try to remember that Bill Gates may not be original, but he is still wrong.
Right and wrong are NOT, as much as society wants to tell us otherwise, relative concepts. They are absolutes and, if anything is relative, it is our implimentation of standards regarding right and wrong.
Mike
